I’m glad that streaming the keynote turned out not to be part of a huge PR plan, and mostly just a nod to the fans. (It’s not like they thought streaming the keynote only to Apple devices was gonna convince PC-using iPhone owners to buy a Mac. That’s a job for the Windows version of iTunes.) I hope they didn’t see it as a full-scale test of their video streaming architecture, because by the second half-hour it started blinking and skipping on me — but I guess there are vastly different constraints when it comes to streaming live video.

Although, considering how trigger-happy QuickTime is when it comes to beginning to play a video while it’s loading, even though it hasn’t buffered enough to last for more than ten seconds, I wouldn’t want to be watching rented videos on an Apple TV. But I digress.

iOS

The first thing I typed into my Twitter client was “Today Apple killed photography.” (I am among those who despise HDR when it’s used poorly, and find that it’s almost always used poorly.) Then Steve showed examples and I stayed my hand. It is possible to make good photography using HDR, if you don’t abuse the filtering, and it looks like iOS 4.1 may be erring on the conservative side here. You can be sure I’ll do some extensive testing when I get the update on my iPhone.

Game Center is nothing we didn’t expect, but the same can’t be said of that Epic Games demo. Better place the Playstation team on suicide watch tonight, because those visuals were stunning. (But damn those stupid virtual-stick controls.) Sure, if you play this game on your iPhone, I expect your battery will be empty in an hour and you’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no means of communication — but this is all about the iPod touch as a game platform.

As for iOS 4.2 for iPad, I’m guessing it will be the first time I can’t resist installing a beta OS on one of my devices — can’t wait for multitasking until November. I was afraid for a while that Apple intended to keep the segregation going between iPhone and iPad, to maintain separate version numbers for each (which would have been insanely dumb), but it sounds like 4.2 will also bring new functionality to the iPhone (starting with AirPlay), so I figure it should exist for iPhone.

I kinda hoped there would be more enhancements, or tweaks, to the multitasking dock and home screen folders, though, to make better use of the iPad’s form factor. Oh well.

iPod shuffle

It’s always nice when Apple can admit that it made a mistake. Well, not exactly “admit” nor “mistake,” but they can just come back and fix it. So… yeah, buttons.

iPod nano

That form factor just looks insanely inconvenient to me. Holding this tiny thing between your fingers while fiddling with the on-screen controls… I’m sad that Steve actually made a joke about wearing it as a wristwatch, because that’s in fact the only way it would be convenient to use. I think it’s an actual missed opportunity.

Instead, we get the rotating-screen gimmick, which is cute, but dictates a square form factor that’s not gonna help watching videos. Oh, wait, this thing doesn’t play videos at all anymore — you’re just expected to buy an iPod touch instead.

I never thought it made much sense to watch videos on a Nano, but it still a little weird to go from the 2009 model that can play and shoot videos to the 2010 version that does neither. (And I always thought there was a market for the Nano as a camcorder. But maybe I’m wrong and real-world users didn’t actually use it.)

iPod touch

Nothing unexpected here, I’m just curious to hold one; the previous Touch was already impressively thin, and the thinner those devices the more they feel like magical artefacts — Harry Potter playing cards (especially with the Retina display).

iPod classic

Well, it’s still on the site even though it didn’t get the faintest mention in the keynote. I find more significant, however, that it doesn’t appear in the iPod comparator page either. It’s clear that Apple only reluctantly keeps it in the store until it becomes pratical to offer a 128GB iPod touch. (Which I assume should be next September.)

I’m sincerely curious as to what would be the reason not to just make a separate iPod touch line with 160GB and 250GB drives. Or did they do too much SSD-optimization on iOS for that to work?

iTunes 10

Oh god, like, whatever.

Just who approved those window control widgets?

And you better hope that Facebook already infringes on some Apple patents, or there’s a lawsuit coming. Never mind that I don’t think Facebook should have been able to patent the news feed concept; the Ping pages might as well have been ripped straight from an Apple engineer’s Facebook account, CSS and all.

Apple TV

I actually burst out laughing when Steve showed the photo comparing the older and new model’s sizes. Most of the changes — including the price — had leaked in the last few weeks, so there wasn’t much to be surprised about, yet nobody thought it would be that small. The drastic simplification of the device is a great idea, and at this price it’s getting hard to argue against buying it (if you have a living room TV, which I don’t). The interface is terribly bland, though; I’d even take the very first Apple TV’s navigation over this.

If it weren’t for Netflix (not that it applies to us in Europe), the rental prices would be a joke. Prices so low you can afford to rent the same video several times and it’ll still be cheaper than buying it, the guy said. Well, at $0.99 the TV show episode, you’ve got to be some serious OCD bean counter to agree.

As for AirPlay, is it anything other than a license to add a “Buy an Apple TV” button on all iPods and iPhones?

According to Apple’s pages, the three-button remotes that were previously integrated into the headphones packaged with the iPod shuffle and iPod touch are now gone; all of the iPods are shown as coming with the same plain old earbuds, which would mean that the iPod touch now needs to rely on its rear-mounted microphone for audio input unless there’s something else hidden inside, or attached as an accessory. Apple’s base model Earphones with Remote + Mic sells for $29 as an upgrade.

Wow, that sucks. It isn’t absurd to make you buy a new set of earphones if you want to use your iPod touch for Skype (although, well, it’s a little absurd in that Apple wants you to use FaceTime), but it’s particularly annoying for the Nano.

In my writeup of the keynote, I was going to say that the new Shuffle had become the only iPod you can conveniently use without looking — whether in your pocket, or while doing something else. Then I edited the words out when I figured that the Nano would have a remote on the earphone cord. Without it, the touch-screen iPods offer terrible UI for real-world usage.

(And I can’t check right now because apple.com is hammered by people who desperately want to play with the new iTunes.)

3 September

Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission. That is, unless some entity wants to access it a lot. In that case, Facebook requires an agreement for reasons primarily centered on protection of Facebook user data and, of course, infrastructure impact.

It’s hard to blame Facebook here. When Apple brags about having 160 million users, with credit card number on file, and decides to sic all of them (and simultaneously) on a Facebook app that will harvest the social network which Facebook took pains to cultivate for years (and for no other purpose than the harvesting itself — unlike, say, Zynga games which bring a lot of page views back to Facebook), you can’t quite fault Facebook for wanting to get some kind of compensation. Apple isn’t building something on top of the Facebook platform here, they’re trying to piggyback and supplant it.

It’s also easy to imagine Steve Jobs deciding — at the last moment, after long, failed negotiations — that Apple is big enough not to need Facebook at all, that it can just as well construct its social graph from scratch. Because that’s how much Steve Jobs and Apple know about social networking: not very.

If Apple is serious about Ping — and they should be, since music recommendations with inline preview have the potential to push a good deal of product — I wager that they’re the ones who will have to give in. Sure, people are signing up for Ping, but if my “entourage”’s experience is any indication, they’re not making a lot of friendship connections and, on Ping more than anywhere, the social graph is where the money’s at.

(I’m assuming that the provision regarding a compensation for extensive use of the API does exist in Facebook’s terms of use, but I see no reason to doubt it — and I’m too lazy to check — because it just makes sense.)

A world where Kindle hardware sales pale in comparison to the iPad but where there’s a very popular Kindle app for iPad that competes against iBooks is not a bad situation for Amazon. Apple is only selling e-books for use on their own devices; Amazon is willing to sell e-books anywhere they can.

That ought to be updated with “should be” — yes, it would be the smartest strategy for Amazon to focus on selling their e-books on whatever platform can read them, but I don’t think that strategy should include a comparative TV ad that goes head-on against the iPad. This move just makes no sense to me.

I’m guessing they’re afraid that iPad users might stick with iBooks and not bother to download the Kindle app… but the correct answer to that is definitely not to antagonize the iOS fanboys.

(Disclaimer: I’ve only watched the ad with the sound off, so for all I know they say the iPad is awesome and the Kindle is just complementary. But somehow I doubt it. Even though that’s exactly what they should say.)

Changing hardware button functions has been argued as of recent, and denied to developers like TapTapTap, due to the fact that it’s not “what users expect” and could be confusing. TapTapTap and other camera app creators tried to use the volume buttons as options to activate the camera shutter to improve convenience but were ultimately deflected by Apple’s review team.

16 September

I don’t like the word “aspects” (who would?) but, if they’re implemented the way I think, it seems to be a good balance of functionality and ease of use. It looks like each contact can only be part of one aspect (one group), though, and I’m not sure if that’s too limiting, or just the right amount of personalization for regular users.

Not that any of this matters, because the only thing that could make them successful would be to have Farmville, and I don’t expect that they will.

My verdict is that none of the three apps I focused on—which mimic and often interact with dedicated e-readers like the Kindle device—towers over the others. Each has its good and bad points, and I personally switch among them.

Same here: I’ve downloaded (free, crappy) books in all of them, and uploaded ePubs to all those that accepted them, and there isn’t one app much better (or much worse) than the others. Which is pretty annoying, because you just instinctively wanna be able to choose a side. And to know where to get / put your damn books.

(I’ve spent most of my time in Stanza, and it’s something of a glaring omission that Mossberg didn’t test it. But I had forgotten about iBooks’s text-to-speech ability and need to give it a try.)

P.S. Since there’s no real winner or loser among those apps, maybe the decision of where to buy your books should ultimately be hardware — if I were to buy e-books, I’d probably get them on Kindle in anticipation of possibly buying the corresponding device at some point.

A few days ago, Facebook made what seemed to be a small tweak to its Friend Requests area. As first noted by Inside Facebook, the social network changed the way friend rejections work. Previously, you could either Confirm or Ignore (deny) a request. Now, Ignore has been replaced by “Not Now”. This new option takes some of the pressure of you having to reject people as it instead moves them into a state of limbo, where they’re neither accepted nor rejected. But it actually does a lot more as well.

You see, when someone requests to be your friend on Facebook, this automatically subscribes them to all of your public (“Everyone”) posts in their News Feed. […] Facebook has to know that most people are probably going to hit this Not Now button once and forget about it. And that’s exactly why this change creates a de-facto follow feature.

I couldn’t figure out what the point of the “Not Now” was; now it makes sense. Facebook remains dead set on its passive-aggressive suicide strategy, and on never ever offering the functionality that its users actually expect.

In other words — as I understand it — the U.S. government wants to finally take full advantage of the fact that domain name registration is fundamentally based in the U.S., and be able to knock any site they want off the internet. (Like people have always been afraid they would.)

22 September

People treat feedback forms like they’re a black hole; they don’t really expect a human to read or respond to their problems, so they just vent. Learn to ignore those negative sentiments if nothing else.

The black hole mentality isn’t surprising, though. Companies of all sizes—even sole proprietors—spend a lot of time saying «we» and hiding behind the face of the company, dehumanizing themselves. I’ve been guilty of it too, but earlier this year I tried an experiment at Black Pixel and made our support page say very explicitly that support mail goes to my personal inbox. It puts my name and my face right on the page. I can definitely say the tone of the incoming mail has changed for the better.

That sounds like a great idea, but I just can’t imagine doing it — for no rational reason whatsoever. It would just feel wrong, no matter how right I absolutely know it would be.

That’s really, really nice. The form factor is gonna be advantageous for many uses, and the device will clearly benefit from being subsidized by carriers.

I still don’t expect (or want) Apple to release a smaller version of the iPad (because the strength of iOS devices is in the App Store, and segmenting the hardware platform would be highly detrimental to the quality of third-party apps), but if there’s one lesson they’re gonna have to take from the burgeoning competition, it is to swallow their pride and get a subsidy deal with AT&T. They were already screwed out of the unlimited data plan anyway; might as well bite the bullet for the sake of being competitive.

Back to the form factor: Samsung is designing its product line in a very different way than Apple sees it (which, mind you, is the only viable way to compete against that juggernaut). It makes sense to own an iPhone and an iPad, and that doesn’t preclude getting a notebook on top of that, for more serious work. On the other hand, it would be absurd to have both the Galaxy Tab and a smartphone; this is clearly designed to complement a cheap featurephone (or no phone at all), with a laptop on the side. And that’s not a bad plan at all.

I soon discovered that the Chinese version of the iPhone 4 comes with an aggravating quirk, though: The built-in Maps app is crippled. My phone’s base map is hard-wired to Google Maps’ censored dataset for China, where the depiction of China’s borders complies with the official propaganda of the Chinese government. It does not, for example, show the region of Arunachal Pradesh as being disputed by China and India. On my phone, it belongs to China, even though the facts on the ground belie it — it is currently administered by India.

That’s creepy on so many levels. How the hell does Google — herald of the freedom of information and all that stuff — justify having a version of the Maps database that displays different information than what Google considers true? Censoring data is one thing, and I would be okay with them redacting parts of the map out, but displaying false information?

P.S. Did I actually write that I would “be okay” with Google blacking out parts of Maps to satisfy the Chinese government? I don’t think I actually meant that.